Former F1 star Alex Wurz on Tuesday announced his retirement as a racing driver.<\/p>\n
The 41-year-old Austrian made his grand prix debut in 1997 for Benetton, but was also a highly-regarded McLaren test driver.<\/p>\n
Wurz, also a two-time Le Mans winner, completed his F1 career at Williams in 2007 but most recently has raced for Toyota in the world endurance championship.<\/p>\n
He is currently the president of F1’s safety-oriented Grand Prix Drivers’ Association.<\/p>\n
“I’ve enjoyed half of my lifetime competing at the top of motor sport and another quarter of it working my way up there, so I feel the time is right to call it a day and bring my career as a professional racing driver to a close,” he said on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Wurz said his decision to quit racing was prompted by last year’s Le Mans, where a 15-hour race lead ultimately ended in retirement.<\/p>\n
“I’d put so much effort into 2014 and into the race preparation that I found it very difficult to move on,” he explained.\u00a0 “This was the moment I knew that my time at the sharp end was coming to a natural end.”<\/p>\n
Wurz’s final race will be the 6 hour sports car race in Bahrain later this month.<\/p>\n
“My future will still evolve around racing, it’s in my blood after all,” he added.\u00a0 “You will still see me around, just without the overalls.”<\/p>\n
\u00a9 RIF | GMM<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Former F1 star Alex Wurz on Tuesday announced his retirement as a racing driver. The 41-year-old Austrian made his grand prix debut in 1997 for Benetton, but was also a highly-regarded McLaren test driver. Wurz, also a two-time Le Mans winner, completed his F1 career at Williams in 2007 but most recently has raced for …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25986,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[3],"tags":[894,5262,5340,566,979,5107],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31565"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31565"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31565\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31566,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31565\/revisions\/31566"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}